The Hungering Circuit
Issue #26: Infomonsters and Formal Theories of Protocols
In this issue: Something lurks deep within the bureaucratic machinery of a well-oiled Neovictorian transportation department, unfortunately for wandering clerks. Also – Discord highlights, recommended reads, catch up on Wednesday’s semiconductor deep dive, and next week’s talk “Towards a Formal Theory of Protocols”.
The Registry of Conveyance brooded beside the rail‑canal like a calcified lung, its limestone façade marbled with soot and anemic verdigris. Inside, brass ductwork laced iron joists, breathing the whole edifice through rhythmic gusts of pneumatic dispatches. Sheet‑iron louvers clicked in iambic precision, modulating air that smelled of lamp‑oil, ozone, and ink only half‑dry. Emerson Lowry—junior clerk, second class—occupied Window VII beneath a wan sodium arc. Each dawn he unlocked his tin case of punches, seals, and ink‑pads, then yielded himself to the choreography of filings and endorsements—an orchestration so exact it scrubbed away sentiment the way a tide smooths footprints from sand.
In the Registry, protocol was scripture. Elastic brass tape‑reels noted every transaction, their hexagonal perforations punched by a wheezing Prosser Automaton older than the clerk himself. Feedforms advanced, were stamped, routed by conveyor arms, and vanished into cage elevators bound for the Sub‑Archive. Continuity was worshipped; an unbroken sequence meant peace, and peace kept higher Ministries at bay. Emerson found comfort in that sacrament—until the numerators began to repeat.
Ticket K‑908238, processed at 08:14, slid back onto his belt at 08:26, its edges still tacky where his seal had bruised the pulp. The ledger showed the entry complete; yet the form demanded fresh attention with hollow, algorithmic insistence. He chalked it up to a misfeed, marked it duplicate, and consigned it to the red audit hopper. Three cycles later, K‑908238 surfaced again—its duplicate mark mysteriously erased. The air around him suddenly felt too thin.
Recurrences multiplied. Citizens shifted in restless queues while the electromechanical annunciator stammered through loops—712… 713… 712… 713… The Automaton’s punch‑head dented ragged patterns, caught in a mechanical stutter. Memo rolls from the Superintendent arrived in self‑negating waves:
Ensure continuity at all costs.
Suspend operations until continuity can be ensured.
Emerson’s nights filled with the clicking of phantom counters—a tinnitus of enumeration.
Eight days in, he noticed a filament of ink coiled beneath his blotter, a black violin string traveling an endless oval. When he tugged, it slipped free, unspooling from an unseen cavity only to retract, a Möbius tendon pulsing with faint electro‑plasmic light. A memory stirred: a footnote in the Codex of Protocol Aberrations, sealed high in Reference Vault β. After hours, he borrowed a maintenance ladder and climbed.
There he found the leaf:
Loopwürm (Class IV Recursion Entity)—“a serpentine abomination of perfect continuity, a hungering circuit nourished by open loops and circular dependencies; invisible until its metabolic rhythm synchronizes with and captures process.”
Acid etchings depicted a brass vertebrate coil ringed by counting wheels, its eyeless head a punched‑card reader, its maw a hopper devouring its own data‑tail and excreting redundant demand—more forms, more loops, forever. Countermeasures were terse: Short‑circuit feedstreams. Perform exhaustive audits. Engage kill‑switches within master breakers. Probability of success declines after Protocol Substrate Saturation.
Emerson descended, pulse beating counterpoint to the building’s steady wheeze. Saturation. In corridor D, glass pneumatic trunks showed paper cylinders racing past—save for one capsule, vibrating in place, trapped in a toroidal eddy. A heat scar glowed ember‑red on the glass. The Loopwürm had tapped the Registry’s arteries.
That night a riverstorm crawled over the city, power flickered, and emergency gas mantles hissed to life. Armed with a coil‑snare, a breaker pole, and the stolen Codex, Emerson descended to the Sub‑Archive. Racks rose like fossilized banyan roots, pierced by steam‑shrouded elevator shafts. Misfiled duplicates lay in drifts, forms foxed to amber by damp. Somewhere in that papery catacomb, pages turned themselves.
Shelving shuddered. Against distant brick, a flotilla of documents spiraled into darkness. At their center writhed the entity: a lattice of brass hoops interlinked by copper intestines, each segment engraved with register glyphs that rewrote themselves in strobing haste. Where a head might be loomed a blind aperture—a tunnel lined with mirrored scales reflecting corridors that returned to the same aperture. From that impossible mouth came the chatter of stamp‑wheels and the sibilant hush of suction, like a bellows inhaling ledger‑souls.
It glided on rails of suspended paperwork, devouring streams of redundancy it spawned in real time—every ingestion birthing twin copies that looped back into its throat. Emerson’s every upstairs keystroke had fattened this beast; obedience had been breadcrumbs to its lair.
Legend said early architects hid master circuit breakers—obsidian levers—to sever entire process trees. They would lie near the manifold where tubes converged. Emerson skirted columns and grease‑slick cogworks; static bristled along his arms. The Loopwürm sensed deviation: its coil contracted, shedding carbon ribbons that fluttered to ensnare his boots. He vaulted racks until bronze cages opened onto a porcelain dais. An iron lever jutted from insulators, a prism crystal pulsing blood‑red beneath leaded glass.
The plate read PRIMARY CONTINUITY ASSURANCE — AUTHORIZING SIGNATURE REQUIRED, yet the signature field was a mirrored loop: a signature no pen could close. Even the failsafes repeated. Shattering the crystal would annul every running index, propagating bureaucratic stasis like floodwater. Emerson hesitated. The Loopwürm closed.
Rings spun incandescent; cellulose scorched the air. Forms erupted, sucked toward its hunger. Instinct—not courage—drove him: he slammed the lever. Glass shattered; the crystal exploded in crimson shards. Lights guttered. Pneumatic trunks exhaled soot. A silence thick as tar settled.
But looped things seldom die where linear things do. The Loopwürm glowed, folding inward, seeking power. Emerson understood with a chill: the last circuit was him—his habit for order. The eyeless cavity angled toward him, coaxing any ritual—checking a watch, aligning a stamp—to splice living continuity into its void.
He looked away and produced the coil‑snare, copper twine lacquered against shock. One fork sailed into the creature’s core; the other stabbed a live busbar exposed by the breaker’s blast. A white arc ripped the dark. The Loopwürm convulsed. For a heartbeat its glyphs froze, revealing plain text:
ERROR: CONTINUITY SOURCE NOT FOUND. INITIATE AUDIT (Y/N?)
He drove the fork deeper. Duplicate tickets ashed to nothing, elevator shafts spewed punched tape that sparked and died, and the Automaton upstairs shrieked before falling still. Dust snowed from the ceiling. When the arc sputtered out, the Loopwürm collapsed into inert rings. Emerson tasted copper and retched onto the ledger‑strewn floor.
End audit report. The phrase stamped itself across his mind. He pocketed one chilled ring as evidence—if any chain of authority still existed—and climbed back to daylight.
Window VII awaited: blotter, inkwell, queue counter frozen at 000. Citizens milled, their tickets now blank ivory—no numbers, no precedence, no quarrel. Emerson set the brass ring atop his workstation and waited for directives that would never arrive.
Above, the great Registry clock resumed, though its tick now lacked tock, dividing time without return. Inspectors came days later, clipboards thick as scripture. They photographed cindered tubes, tagged cogs for salvage, and sealed the Sub‑Archive behind lead‑lined doors. Emerson testified: loops, anomalies, entity, breaker. Their pens slowed at “serpentine protocol entity.” He offered recursive load‑bearing aberrant process. Relieved, they filed it under Systems Failure—a category with comforting precedents.
The Registry reopened leaner. Pneumatic trunks gave way to magneto‑lifts; the Prosser Automaton was smelted into plaques extolling continuity tempered by failsafe design. Emerson stayed on, reassigned to Irregularity Prevention & Audit—one desk, three kill‑crystals keyed to his palm. Protocol required periodic tests. He set alarms, but moments before each rang, he silenced it, refusing the birth of even a tiny loop. His routine grew intentionally erratic: sometimes stamp before sign, sometimes sign before stamp; pens migrated hourly. Citizens found him eccentric yet efficient; queues meandered but finished faster. No recurrences, for a season.
Then on a fog‑bound morning, a girl presented an application folded into perfect quarters. At its top: K‑908238. The digits glimmered, ink remembering another world where time orbited itself. Emerson searched for duplicates—none. The brass ring in his drawer lay inert. Dread arrived, lighter but unmistakable: recursion is interrupted, never slain.
His fingers brushed a kill‑crystal, but he stayed the impulse. Instead he launched Audit Pre‑Zero, a prophylactic routine he had authored: randomized sampling, cross‑checks, human oversight. Tedious, yes, but tedium branching outward rather than curling inward. Adjacent clerks assisted; the queue flowed like water around sandbars. The applicant left with her license; the number did not return. Emerson consulted his pocket‑watch once—only once. Fifteen seconds had passed where a loop might have closed. Time moved on.
Night pooled in the Registry. New inductees swept floors while Emerson logged the day. He left the ledger open to dry—a deliberate breach. Sodium dusk glinted on disassembled gear‑trains like fossil constellations. Emerson Lowry closed the last shutter and stepped into the fog, each footfall striking unique cobbles, refusing cadence. Behind him, the Registry ticked without tock, an imperfect heart beating onward—fallible, mortal, and, for now, safe from the hungers of perfect continuity.
Discord Highlights
With the Summer of Protocols seasonal programming in full force next week, Discord activity is picking up. There are some UX improvement projects afoot, including new categories and tags. It will also soon be home base for professionally facilitated study groups (learn more). Here’s what happened this week:
“…even though people complain a lot of bureaucracy, you cannot change bureaucracy by approaching it directly from the middle…if you need to change anything you have to go up one layer above or below.” - Sachin Benny
Mapping of Boydian maneuvering and blitzkrieg theory to protocols in #idle-protocol-musings.
Someone leaked top secret whiteboard notes from the curriculum development bootcamp at Edge Esmeralda.
Two new categories, SCENE MAKING and SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS, made their way into the server architecture.
The #reading-room adopted five new tags for more thorough organization of shared links, articles, and research documents.
Want to poke around and see what’s happening? Go for it.
Reading List
Some grabs from the #reading-room and recommendations from the SoP community:
Cursed Problems in Game Design by Alex Jaffe
Train Teachers like Navy SEALs by
Handbook on Institutions and Complexity edited by Eric Alston et al
A Course on Public Sector Strategy by
Have a protocol-related read that you like? Add it to the SoP Discord’s composable “library” a.k.a. the #reading-room.
Town Halls & Technical Talks
This week, engineer
provided a deep dive into the semiconductor industry through the lens of protocols. The talk spanned everything from precision manufacturing to information security, and integrated several ideas from the SoP research archive.Interested in electronics or engineering systems? Play it back.
Wednesday, June 11, 10am PDT, marks the next guest talk of the summer program, where we will take a small step towards a formal theory of protocols. The talk by SoP program director
will introduce some major ideas, challenges, and opportunities in technical approaches to protocol studies – as well as a dedicated Special Interest Group and a fall event called Basket of Protocols.Are you mathematically inclined? RSVP here.